What’s The Deal with Apollo Donuts?

The donut evolution is taking the specialty dessert world by storm: Apollo Donuts has kneaded, fried and glazed their way into Edmonton’s exclusive dessert scene. We had the opportunity to foresee all the hard work that Josh and Yen go through to make their specialty donuts.

In the kitchen by 4am, while everyone else is still sound asleep in their beds, they put a lot of time and dedication into making the donuts that everyone adores. On average, they make 1200 donuts during their production days on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The production days usually take about 4-4.5 hours to complete. Josh starts baking donuts by 4am, while Yen isn’t the best morning person, so he comes in a bit later but we don’t blame him. First, the dough is made, and left to rise. At this time, the glazes for each are made. When the dough is ready, it is cut and left to rise for a second time.

Once the donuts have risen, it’s time to fry!!

After the fryer, the donuts are set aside to be glazed. One of our favourite glazes was the apple fritter glaze- they use Alberta’s only local apple cider vinegar “Uncommon Cider”. Next, the donuts are boxed in to orders and delivered by Yen to their destinations.

We asked Josh and Yen how many donuts they eat a week; Josh eats about 12, and Yen eats 3 to 4. Best R&D we can think of!

Josh has always enjoyed baking as a hobby and wanted to make good quality donuts with fresh ingredients that people could enjoy at their local coffee shop. So him and a couple good friends started talking about pursuing the donut hobby into a business. They wanted their donuts to be made with only fresh ingredients, and no preservatives or artificial flavouring.

When asking about where the name “Apollo” came from, Josh told us he wanted to have that diner aesthetic feel from the 60’s.

It has a kind of nostalgic feel to it and reminded him of the days where people would go to a local diner and eat a donut with their fresh cup of coffee.

They guys even let us in us in on their very special tradition. Every morning when the first batch of donuts finishes, you take a fresh out of the fryer donut, toss it in cinnamon sugar and let it melt in your mouth. We had the chance to partake and indulge with them-it was incredible!

To date, they have created 11 flavours with 10 currently in production. They take such pride in developing these flavours, that it takes a few test months to fully become part of the rotation.

They currently sell their donuts at these four locations:

Transcend (Friday and Saturday)

The Columbian Coffee Bar and Roastery (Saturday)

Ritchie Market (Saturday)

Love Pizza (Thursday and Friday)

We are always excited to find local businesses who share the same love for food as we do. It was a pleasure learning about their partnership and business, they put in a lot of work to produce great donuts, make sure to check them out!